The pregnancy police are racking up arrests
Every 74 seconds, someone in the US is sexually assaulted. And every nine minutes that ‘someone’ is a child, according to statistics collated by the anti-sexual violence non-profit Rainn.
Instead of sending alleged sex offenders to court, the Trump administration seems more interested in putting them in positions of power. Less than 4% of reported rapes, sexual assaults and child sexual abuse allegations in certain cities across the country ever lead to a sex crime conviction, an NBC News investigation from earlier this year found. To reiterate: that’s reported assaults. By some counts, nearly 80% of rapes and sexual assaults go unreported.
Don’t be too hard on the justice system, though. After all, police and prosecutors have got far more important things to think about than rapists. Namely: locking up pregnant women. According to new research by Pregnancy Justice, prosecutors in 16 states charged 412 people with pregnancy-related crimes in the first two years after the US supreme court overturned Roe v Wade.
What, you may be wondering, is a pregnancy-related crime? Good question! Most of the cases included in the new report involved low-income women and allegations of substance use during pregnancy. In one case described to the Guardian, a woman was arrested for felony child neglect after giving birth when a drug test came back positive for marijuana. The woman in that case had a medical marijuana card. While substance use during pregnancy is obviously a serious issue that can result in long-term harm to the baby, research suggests that criminalization actually worsens health outcomes.
What is most worrying about this post-Roe trend of “pregnancy-related crimes”, however, is that the laws used in most of these prosecutions are meant to protect children rather than fetuses. What we are seeing here is a growing acceptance of the idea of “fetal personhood”, which grants fetuses and embryos the full rights of a legal person. According to Pregnancy Justice, at least 24 states include language around “fetal rights” in laws regulating or prohibiting abortion care.
You can see where this is going, right? We’re headed towards the increased surveillance of pregnant people and the criminalization of any behaviour the Trump administration might unilaterally consider “dangerous”. Taking Tylenol during pregnancy, for example. “What our work has proven is that, unfortunately, anything is possible when it comes to policing pregnancy,” a spokesperson from Pregnancy Justice said.
For a terrifying glimpse of America’s future, look to El Salvador, which an increasing number of experts are warning could serve as a model for the US. Ever since 1998, there has been a total abortion ban in El Salvador, even when the life of the mother is at risk. Pregnancy is aggressively policed and there is what Amnesty International has termed a “guilty until proven innocent” approach when it comes to women who suffer pregnancy-related complications. Although having a miscarriage or a stillbirth is not technically illegal, a recent investigation by the journalist Maria Hinojosa found El Salvadorian prisons are full of women who lost their babies. One woman who was incarcerated for a miscarriage told Hinojosa that she estimates “90% of the women who are in prison in El Salvador are in prison for this”. While that’s obviously an observation rather than hard data, it’s still frightening.
Donald Trump has made his admiration for El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, the self-described “coolest dictator in the world”, and his repressive regime very clear. Increasingly, the two countries seem to be in lockstep. While there’s been a global trend towards liberalizing abortion laws, for example, only four countries have bucked this trend and rolled back abortion rights in the past 25 years: the US, El Salvador, Nicaragua and Poland. The arc of the moral universe, as we all know, is long. But in an increasingly authoritarian and misogynistic US, it does not seem to be bending anywhere near justice.
Spain seeks to make abortion a constitutional right
On Friday Spain’s leftist government said it was planning on following France’s lead and making abortion rights constitutional. “With this government, there will be no backtracking on social rights,” Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez wrote on X.
Conservatives rush to explain how being pro-death penalty is pro-life
“Someone who says I’m against abortion but is in favor of the death penalty is not really pro-life,” Chicago-born Pope Leo XIV said this week. “And someone who says I’m against abortion but I’m in agreement with the inhuman treatment of immigrants in the United States, I don’t know if that’s pro-life.” The rightwing political commentator Matt Walsh immediately rushed to explain that, actually, the pope’s argument is “moral madness” and the “death penalty is pro-life”. So many mental gymnastics going on there, he deserves a medal.
Megachurch pastor pleads guilty to child sexual abuse
Robert Morris, who joined the White House spiritual advisory committee during the first Trump presidency, pleaded guilty to sexually abusing a 12-year-old girl in Oklahoma in the 1980s.
Women dominate the World Cheese Competition
Finally, some gouda news: the Philadelphia cheesemonger Emilia D’Albero and teammate Courtney Johnson recently won first place at the Mondial du Fromage in France, a competition sometimes known as the “Cheesemonger Olympics”. “My teammate … and I are the first all-female team USA,” D’Albero said. “They had never sent two girls before.”
The ‘motherhood penalty’ is very expensive
Mothers in England lose an average of £65,618 ($88,392) in pay by the time their first child turns five, new figures show.
Israel is paying social media influencers $7,000 a post to whitewash genocide
The campaign is nicknamed “Esther Project” and is coordinated by a company called Bridges Partner, Responsible Statecraft reports. This is part of a wider initiative, costing hundreds of millions, to rehab the country’s image. If Russia were paying influencers $7,000 a post, I’m fairly sure it would be covered by every media outlet in the US, but basically nobody has bothered reporting on this.
Rightwing men love airing their grotesque Greta Thunberg fantasies
The Newsmax Australia broadcaster Daniel Lewkovitz tweeted about how he hopes Thunberg, who was among flotilla activists detained by the Israeli military this week, gets tortured. “I want Greta Thunberg terrified,” Lewkovitz wrote. “I want her screaming and begging for it to stop. I want her rocking in a corner, covering her eyes. pissing and shitting in her pants.” Lewkovitz is just the latest in a long line of male pundits and politicians to publicly wish harm on Thunberg. In June, for example, the Barstool Sports CEO, Dave Portnoy, said he hoped a missile hits Thunberg. The Republican senator Lindsey Graham also publicly fantasized about the aid ship Thunberg was on sinking.
The week in pawtriarchy
Last week’s newsletter alerted you to the bear-y important Fat Bear Week competition. This week I’m delighted to announce there’s a winner: bear 32, AKA Chunk. He handily defeated bear 602, also known as Flotato, and will be added to the Fat Bear Week Hall of Champions. Glad to be the bearer of good news for once.
Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist
